The ATI All-in-Wonder Radeon 8500 AGP 128MB is the Best card from ATI so far!
Written: Jun 25 '02 (Updated Jan 30 '03)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Fast, smooth with a built-in TV.
Cons: Mainly the retail price of $399.
The Bottom Line: This is the best ATI card I have seen so far, I highly recommend it.
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| surferdude7's Full Review: ATI ALL-IN-WONDER RADEON 8500, (128 MB) AGP Video ... |
The ATI All-in-Wonder Radeon 8500 AGP 128MB has plenty of memory and power for all your gaming and application needs.
Here is a video card with 128MB of DDR RAM, a built-in stereo tuner, Dolby Digital 5.1 capability through a DVD playback if your player has a decoder, video input and output plus a wireless remote. This is what makes this an All-in-Wonder video card.
With the built-in TV tuner capable of 125 channels you can view your favorite TV channel in the corner while surfing the Internet. It has Zoom & Pan for zooming in on the action and panning your own close-ups.
With this card you can capture video at 720 x 480 dpi and at 30 frames-per-second. The card provides 32-bit 3D gaming at high resolutions up to 2048 x 1536 dpi.
The All-In-Wonder's Radeon 8500 core clock speed runs at 275MHz with a memory clock speed of 275MHz. (550MHz effective)
Operating System
The ATI All-in-Wonder Radeon 8500 AGP 128MB Does Not Run as Good on Windows 98 and is Not Made for Windows 95.
The card is made for Best performance with Windows ME, 2000 and XP.
The card also needs the following:
AGP 2x or 4x slot
128MB of system memory
Remote control receiver requires a USB port
A processor of at least 500 MHz
A CD or DVD-ROM for software installation
The Remote
This is an RF Wireless Remote, what I mean by this is you can point it at any direction or even be in another room and it will work. You don’t have to worry about pointing it at something.
It looks very similar to a TV remote, you can also use it as your mouse if you wish. It is made for TV control, DVD control, gaming features and controlling your video card.
They provide you with an input box if you wish to control an external DVD player or VCR.
Software
ATI bundles four CDs with all kinds of drivers and software to use. You get Multimedia Center 7.6 with Capture Drivers, Ulead Video Studio, MatchWare Mediator 6 and Half Life.
FEATURES
Charisma Engine II It is for complex transformation, clipping, and lighting calculations faster than any CPU or 3D graphics chip on the market.
Hyper Z improves memory bandwidth efficiency
Pixel Tapestry II is a graphics architecture to include three independent texture units in each rendering pipeline. This is for more realistic 3D surfaces.
SmoothVision is for support of High-Performance anti-aliasing mode and a High-Quality anti-aliasing mode.
SmartShader is for the game developers to design life like 3D objects.
TruForm overcomes memory and bandwidth problems for the smoothest and most realistic images that can be shown on your PC.
Video Immersion II is for giving you the best video quality possible.
Other Features
Bilinear & Trilinear Filtering
DirectX 8.1 support
Dual Display Support
Full-Screen Anti-aliasing
Integrated Transformation, Clipping & Lighting
Line & Edge Anti-aliasing
OpenGL 1.3
Spherical, Dual-Paraboloid & Cubic environment mapping
Single-Pass Multi-texturing
SuperScalar Rendering
Texture Cache
Texture Compositing
Texture Decompression
Triangle Setup Engine
True Color Rendering
Twin Cache Architecture
Z-Buffering & Double-Buffering
Display Modes
The 8500 offers you all kinds of display modes, 640 x 480, 800 x 600, 1024 x 768, 1152 x 864, 1280 x 1024, 1600 x 1200, 1920 x 1080, 1920 x 1200, 1920 x 1440 and 2048 x 1536.
Overall
This is a very impressive card and it seems ATI has done their homework on this one. Even though it lists for $399 remember it has 128 MB of DDR memory, it is a TV card, it is a capture card and a video card making the price not to bad when you add it up.
Installation is easy, they provide good documentation for installation and the use of the card.
Games are very smooth in action and the color is great! Video editing with the card is simple and easy to use and the TV built-in is handy with the ability to capture right from it.
This card is great for gaming and video editing!
Overall this card is a winner.
Here are some of my Computer Hardware Reviews!
Western Digital 100GB EIDE Hard Drive
Visiontek Visiontek XTasy 6564 AGP 64MB Card
AMD Athlon XP 2100
AMD Athlon XP 2700 Processor
Asus A7N8X Motherboard
EPoX EP-8K7A Socket A ATX Motherboard
Here are some of my Computer reviews!
Dell Dimension 8250 Series
Dell SmartStep 200 Series Notebook Computers
HP Omnibook XE3 PIII Notebook Computers
emachines T2080
The Sony VAIO R505DL Super Slim Pro Notebook
The Parts for Building a Computer from Scratch!
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 349
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